A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF HYDROLOGICAL SIGNATURES OF TWO WESTERN GHAT CATCHMENTS

Understanding catchment’s behavior and characterizing them is paramount to watershed hydrology and effective water management. The concept of hydrological/diagnostic signature/index is not new, but recently, there has been a resurgence of its applications in hydrology. Hydrological signatures have been used to represent catchment responses leading to a wide range of applications in water resources assessment like catchment classification, change detection, model calibration, model evaluation, water balance study and information transfer about catchment behavior from gauged to ungauged catchments. Hydrological signatures may be derived mainly from flow duration curve and rainfall data. Depending on the objective of study, a part or whole of flow duration curve may be used for signature based analysis. The Western Ghats being important for some of the states in India, it is yet to be explored fully in terms of hydrological analysis. As a preliminary study, two catchments, namely, Netravati (per humid) and Malaprabha (sub humid) catchments have been considered for the present study for the evaluation of hydrological signature. Only flow based indices will be considered for the catchments. The analyses at both daily and monthly scale show that, Netravati is wetter than Malaprabha catchment. It is envisaged that, the analysis will provide insights into catchment responses and help us manage them better